Covenants of Wholeness: Adoption and Land Tenure in Georgian England and the Hawaiian Kingdom

Abstract

Michael Giffin suggests that throughout history adoption has reflected the social covenant of the society it existed to serve. For example, adoption served semi-feudal agrarian society in different ways from adoption in modern industrialised society. Adoption was once an agreement among extended families and allies, which did not mandate divorce from birth families and sought to advantage birth and adoptive families alike. While it often led to unexpected outcomes, if successful, adoption became a principal means of accruing the social and economic benefits on which sovereignty and commonwealth once depended. Through those benefits, adoption became a way of promoting wholeness, soteria in biblical Greek, a word from which the term salvation has evolved.

After describing the ideas of covenant and wholeness, and the practices of land tenure and adoption, this article compares case studies of adoption in the Austen and Kamehameha families during a period in which Britain and Hawaii made their extraordinarily rapid transitions from semi-feudalism to constitutional monarchy. One conclusion drawn is that societies once thought conservative and exclusive are actually adaptive and inclusive. Another is that the imperative of wholeness, like the idea of salvation, is a chameleon: it changes its colour to fit in with its surroundings.